City Grocery Restaurant Group, headed by James Beard Foundation Award-winning chef John Currence, announced the arrival of new executive chef Tory McPhail, another Beard award winner, last month. Also included in the announcement were plans to open a second location of Oxford mainstay Bouré in another city.
Bouré falls under the City Grocery Restaurant Group’s umbrella of eateries. With McPhail in place as the new executive chef, plans have proceeded to expand Bouré to a second location.
As he scouts this new location, Currence looks to a connection already made for another one of his brand’s restaurants.
“We’re eyeballing (Birmingham, Ala.) — that’s no secret,” Currence said. “I mean, we’ll have, by the end of this year, five Big Bad Breakfasts there. Our executive team for Big Bad Breakfast is basically centered in Birmingham. … And then it’s geographically located between here and (Florida State Road 30A), so it’s a little easier for Tory to get to, and Birmingham’s a fantastic market.”
While there may be a location in mind, there is not a time frame set for opening.
“I shouldn’t talk about two or three or four locations — we’ve got to (talk about) this one first,” Currence said. “And prove it out, which is exactly what we did with Big Bad Breakfast. Big Bad Breakfast outside of Oxford looks a little different than the Oxford store … we tweaked the knobs for two and a half years before we opened our second location outside of Oxford, so hopefully we can move a little more quickly.”
In addition to discussing second location plans for Bouré, McPhail and Currence touched on their backgrounds in the culinary industry and their new partnership in an interview with The Daily Mississippian.
“My first job cooking was a total mistake,” Currence, a New Orleans native, said. “The summer before I went into college, I’d gotten a job to work on one of my dad’s tugboats in the Gulf of Mexico, and when I arrived the morning after I graduated from high school I was summarily informed that I was going to be the cook on the boat. … I had to cook for eight or 10 guys all summer long — breakfast, lunch and dinner – and had a ball doing it.”
From there, Currence ventured further into the culinary world.
“When I ended up going off to college and I needed extra money, that was sort of the direction I went,” Currence said. “I got a couple of jobs here and there while I was in college in Virginia. Then I ended up at the University of North Carolina. Under my own steam, I completely accidentally fell into a kitchen that in the mid-1980s was being crowned as the place that was bringing Southern cuisine to the fine dining table.”
That place was Crook’s Corner, founded by Bill Neal and Gene Hamer in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 1982. The restaurant, deemed one of “America’s Classics” by the James Beard Foundation Awards, served Southern-style food for nearly 40 years, closing its doors in 2021.
Currence would return to his hometown of New Orleans, developing a resume including the fine-dining restaurant Gautreau’s and with the Brennan series of restaurants, under whom McPhail worked for more than 20 years. After his stint there, Currence came to Oxford.
“An opportunity to open (City Grocery) presented itself in (1998) and I just ran headlong into it,” Currence said. “I didn’t really choose Oxford. Oxford sort of chose me, and so I was just lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.”
Currence recalled that he did not anticipate the amount of success he found in the town.
“I came here thinking that I would be here for a couple or three years and then go on to New York or go back to New Orleans,” Currence said. “I realized early on with the success that we had at the Grocery that there was a life to be made here. At that time, I mean, it was a wide open frontier — there weren’t very many restaurants at all beyond ones that were catered to the student community.”
McPhail, hailing from Washington state, had a similarly unconventional start into the world of food.
“My first foray into food wasn’t even in restaurants — it was my uncle’s raspberry farm,” McPhail said. “He ended up farming hundreds and hundreds of acres of raspberries from the time I was itty-bitty and we grew all of our fruit and picked it into big 50-gallon drums for the local co-op.”
This agricultural upbringing, along with the growing of various other crops in his family’s garden, led to an interest in the culinary arts.
“Even before getting into middle school, I had a very good appreciation for where food comes from, and then how hard it is to try to bring it to the table, and so I had a lot of reverence for our food systems in the Pacific Northwest,” McPhail said.
From there, McPhail decided that he wanted to be a chef.
“It just became clear that I wanted to get out of my hometown and really kind of get some sunshine in my face,” McPhail said. “So my path to do that was to get to the best culinary school I could. So I went down to (South Seattle College), the best school in the state at that time, and then graduated at the top of my class.”
McPhail recalled when his mentor at the college provided a piece of advice that changed his trajectory.
“I told him ‘I just want to be a great chef as quick as I could,’” McPhail said. “He quickly told me that I only had two options in life. It was either go to New York City, the greatest concentration of amazing restaurants possibly in the world — but I was a small farm kid from a tiny little farming town — and he also said, ‘Your second option, (if) you really want to understand American cuisine, if you really want to understand how to cook, then you have to go to New Orleans.’”
McPhail went to New Orleans, working at the award-winning Commander’s Palace for 27 years, 19 of those as the institution’s executive chef. In 2013, McPhail won a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the South.
It was this background that first drew Currence to McPhail.
“I don’t remember the first time (we met). I remember remarking when we did meet, ‘He got that job at 28,’” Currence said. “The potential egomania for a majority of people that would be put in that position at that age in our industry, the success rate is maybe 3-5%, so in my mind that was another one of the many things that I always thought was incredibly admirable about (McPhail).”
Naturally, McPhail’s cooking also attracted Currence’s compliments.
“Since the first time we met, the first time I tasted his food, the dozens of times that I ate at Commander’s when he was at the helm, I’m only sorry that I was five and a half hours separated and was unable to do it more,” Currence said.
For McPhail, Currence’s success preceded him.
“He has had a huge reputation in New Orleans,” McPhail said. “I’ve always heard his name get tossed around, and people have crazy respect for him all over New Orleans, but especially in the Brennan family restaurant environment, and so that was my first introduction to him before I even had the opportunity to meet him.”
McPhail’s excitement for the new role was evident when he talked about it.
“Having the opportunity to join John and the team up here in all these restaurants, I think it’s just an opportunity that is extraordinary,” McPhail said. “Really the most important thing is just to embellish on the legacy that he has already built, and so if I can be a very small part of that in all the different restaurants and help perpetuate the success, then I think that’s the goal.”
